Art
Enveloped in vibrant drips of red and green paint sits a child with bound feet feeding her brother rice, the latter’s gaze piercing and vivid. Standing at 80 inches, Hung Liu’s “White Rice Bowl” is one of the first paintings audiences see when entering “100 Years of Creative Visions.” This exhibition, which opened in September and runs through April 26, celebrates the centennial anniversary of the Mills College Art Museum, and with it, a long history of uplifting the diverse…
Whoever broke into an off-site Oakland Museum storage facility earlier this month probably had no idea they were stealing historic artifacts, the museum said in a statement issued Friday. “There is no indication that the perpetrators specifically identified the facility as museum storage or sought particular artworks or artifacts. Instead, it appears they gained access and took items that were most easily available,” the statement said. No arrests have been made in what the museum is calling “a crime of…
Visitors coming into Oakland’s Chinatown now will meet a staggering dragon watching over the intersection of Jackson and 10th streets. Its mythical presence is a reminder to stand against hate, according to the community groups and team of artists who christened the dragon mural “Together, We Rise” last week. Its unveiling served as a kickoff to United Against Hate Week, which runs nationwide through Saturday. United Against Hate began in Berkeley in 2017 as a poster campaign responding to white…
On an early evening in September, a modest crowd entering the Dresher Ensemble Studio received disappointing news at the door: One of the two acts they came to see would not be performing. However, the show must go on, and the West Oakland Sound Series is no stranger to improvisation. Matt Ingalls, Sound Series director, was not going to let his audience go without a second act. In the spirit of this avant-garde musical community, he would later join woodwinds…
For the past year, an exhibit at the Oakland Black Panther Party Museum has educated visitors about the community school model that was launched by the Panthers in 1973 and has since been incorporated into every Oakland Unified School District building. Recently, the exhibit’s reach was expanded, thanks to the efforts of a Madison Park Academy student and the nonprofit Ocelotl, which worked to translate the exhibit into Spanish. “The Black Panther Party, they brought communities together, and I feel…
Cava Menzies could feel the warm sun pouring into her bedroom as she sat in silence, eyes closed, legs crossed, engaged in meditation. Menzies, a founding faculty member and music teacher at the Oakland School for the Arts, often draws creative inspiration during morning meditation in her downtown Oakland apartment. But this meditation session in February 2022 brought a revelation. After her practice, Menzies wrote CO-LLAB Choir on her whiteboard, her intuition telling her to create an adult ensemble group. …
Sydney Seibold uses art to tell stories about her experience as an Asian American. Seibold, 16, a student at Gateway to College, was born in Tokyo to a Thai parent and immigrated to Oakland at age 3. Her boldly colored drawing of the yak, a figure in Thai culture that sits in front of sacred buildings to protect them from spiritual threats, is one of 50 digital and photographic works in the Oakland Asian Cultural Center’s 10th annual youth art…
“The Nutcracker” ballet has been performed at Christmastime for more than 100 years, but not quite the way the Oakland Ballet is staging it this weekend. “Graham Lustig’s The Nutcracker” isn’t set in the stuffy Victorian era, but in the looser early 20th century, when women had ditched their corsets and upped their hems, when they had sidestepped convention for free thinking. “A birth of intellectualism for women, when women were fighting for suffrage, riding bicycles and had a different…
The siege of Gaza played out before a packed house at Oakland’s Regal Jack London theater, where the documentary “Bisan,” created by Palestinian journalist and filmmaker Bisan Owda about her daily life, had a rare screening Wednesday. Some in the audience cried softly as they bore witness to the horrors of Israel’s 2023-24 siege of Gaza: buildings falling, bombs exploding, children screaming. The documentary was compiled entirely from social media clips shot by Owda. Her posts have found a large…